To The World's End

Extract

A Recurrent motif in Latin poets is the assertion that somebody would follow somebody else anywhere, to the world's end if need be. This mannerism is worth notice for its curious persistence over a long period, and it is amusing to observe the details, the places which suggest themselves to the writers as dangerous or remote.

The series seems to begin with Catullus (II. 1–4): he has two cronies who will follow him wherever he goes, whether east to Parthia or Hyrcania and the Sacae beyond, or—presumably on another line, by sea—to the Arabs and the uttermost Indians, litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda, or south to the Nile, or north over the high Alps to the Rhine and the far-western Britons, just then being invaded by Julius Caesar. In fact the poet went east only to Bithynia, and nothing is known of journeys in other directions. (One scholar has even questioned whether he really came home all the way on his ‘yacht’, as poem 4 is generally understood to say.)¹

Propertius is extravagant: with his friend he would scale the fabulous mountains of the north wind or go south to Ethiopia and beyond, whatever he may conceive to be there— cum quo Rhipaeos possim conscendere montes ulteriusque domo vadere Memnonia.² With his lady he would go mare per longum and endure anything (iii. 22. 9). A love-sick girl is made to write to her soldier, who is supposed to have seen the world from Britain and the wintry Getae to a generously large and elastic eastern frontier: if service regulations allowed, she would be with him, and Scythian mountains and frozen waters would not stop her: as it is, she can only look for his whereabouts on a map, e tabula pictos ediscere mundos.